[labnetwork] HF storage

[Hathaway, Malcolm R]

Hi Savitha,

This is Mac Hathaway, the Nanofabrication Safety officer at Harvard CNS.  This is an interesting question from a general perspective, of what and how much to do about the occasional lapse in user behavior which could have bad consequences.

In our lab, we do not repackage hazardous chemicals, and rely on proper reading of labels for proper use of chemicals.  Occasionally, we have considered repackaging for various purposes (smaller bottle size, usually) but have concluded that the additional risk to staff from extra handling of hazardous materials would not be worth it.  (it turns out pouring a full gallon bottle of toxic chemical from one jug to another through a funnel is not as trivial as it may sound.)

Different cap colors might help (our acids come with different cap colors, but the particular colors seem relatively random.  For reference, HF cap is white).  Marking HF bottles in large bold letters with a permanent marker might also help.

The most important element in this kind of situation is to teach the users the importance of the concept of Situation Awareness, the idea that every user must Pay Attention to what they are doing ALL THE TIME.  I don't want this to sound facetious, as it is literally the most important concept that we teach in our chemical safety training.  We hammer away at this concept all the time, for exactly the situation you describe.

Quite seriously, no amount of fancy labeling, signage, color codes, etc. will prevent the user lacking situation awareness from making the most monumental errors.

It would be interesting to know what the circumstances were surrounding these incidents.  Was this late at night?  Did they mistake the bottles, or did they mistake the recipe?  Where they rookies, or in a hurry?  Often, attention to these other aspects of the incidents can pay greater dividends.

Specifically with regard to HF, I find that scaring the dickens out of the users during their introduction to the chemicals enhances their retention of the important points.


Mac Hathaway
Process and Systems Engineer
Harvard CNS

________________________________
From: labnetwork <labnetwork-bounces at mtl.mit.edu> on behalf of Savitha P <savithap at iisc.ac.in>
Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2023 7:19 AM
To: labnetwork at mtl.mit.edu <labnetwork at mtl.mit.edu>
Subject: Re: [labnetwork] HF storage

Hi!

We recently had a couple of occasions where users had mistakenly used Hydrofluoric acid in place of Hydrochloric acid during RCA cleaning. To avoid this, one of the suggestions we have received from our OLSEH is to store HF in a different coloured bottle (currently all acids are stored in white translucent polypropylene bottles which are properly labelled). Accordingly, we had considered storing HF in opaque, brown colour HDPE bottles. However, that was not deemed acceptable by a section of users saying bottles should be translucent so that acid level inside can be judged.

Could you please let me know how small quantities of HF are stored in your respective fabs. Is there any regulation governing storage of HF, so that we could implement the same.

Thanks and regards,
Savitha


Dr. Savitha P
Chief Operating Officer
National Nanofabrication Centre
Centre for Nanoscience and Engineering
Indian Institute of Science
Bangalore - 560012
India.
Ph. +91 80 2293 3319
www.cense.iisc.ac.in
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